write the saddest lines
by Gray Doll
Summary: Maybe he will write them a story. It will be the one in which Jane loves Lisbon the right way and he loves her enough, and Marcus Pike will be neither a character nor a clue. / Jane, Lisbon, Pike, and a thing forgotten. Rated T/M.


**Notes: **I don't know exactly how this happened. But this particular "clue" idea has been in my head for so long now, I wouldn't find peace until I wrote something about it. A big thank you to the wonderful clairebare for proofreading and fixing up the messy things!

* * *

**Write The Saddest Lines**

Patrick Jane and Red John were people of prose.

They were a question mark slipped in at the start of the sentence, through bared blades and tigers' roars and blood; a pair of parentheses slipped in for every lie, every careful omission, every half-truth; an exclamation mark for all the decelerations of hatred and sick pride and the countless promises to forever hunt each other.

They were always a half-finished story, a novel ending on a cliffhanger, a book with countless pages. And for them, it was enough – it seemed to be an easy choice, to play hide and seek without ever hurting each other. It is an easy choice, to coexist without ever finding out who is the tiger and who is the lamb.

Teresa Lisbon is prose. She does not waste her time in a long story with very little meaning. She loves Patrick Jane. Period. She has for a very long time, and she will for a very long time to come.

But, she thinks on quiet nights, what if the sentiment isn't mutual?

What then, indeed.

(That's when Marcus Pike enters the book; that's when the writer decides, time for a new protagonist. Time for a twist to keep the reader entertained.)

* * *

If Patrick Jane was a writer, he would write of her.

(On quiet nights, it takes him some time to decide who 'her' is. Most of the time, he ends up thinking about Lisbon.)

For years he has lived a life like a secret – or at least, something like it. For years he has atoned for his sins. For years he has watched her. And he knows now, that for years he has loved her. In a different way than he loved his wife, yes – but it _is _love, and it's like a physical thing now, like a wound, a bloody curl into his flesh that will never fully heal.

But there are things between the lines, before their story and quite possibly after, that he would rather not have on paper;

A devilishly cunning opponent, who was just like him but oh so different at the same time, that he just couldn't manage to shake off no matter how much he tried. Psychologists would conduct field studies on the unhealthy emotional attachment between them, about the foreplay-like sparring, about the fact that they, time and time again, can't help but share the same thoughts, the same dreams, the same words.

A rogue demon, who sunk his blades and claws into his life, and saved him time and time again – there had been the luminescent moon above them when the other man had run away for the umpteenth time, his lips twisted into a wicked smile, and maybe it was a kind of love after all (you were right, Mr Stiles, weren't you?), but Patrick Jane can forget about it. Some things are easy to forget.

Because Teresa is the sun. And just like Juliet she can rise, and kill the envious moon always looming, hovering, behind him.

* * *

Red John has spent his entire life being chased, and it was his choice.

He thinks dully about it as he stabs Lorelei in a dark alley, as he watches another message in blood seep into the ground. This is just enough violent crimson, he thinks, that even Patrick Jane and Teresa Lisbon can understand.

He walks away and ponders how different his life would have been, if he had not discovered how easy it is to slip a knife through flesh, how thrilling it is to hold power over life and death, or if he had not met Patrick Jane with his golden smile and the glinting eyes. He could have spent his life sitting still and harmless.

He ponders – once in a bed with Rebecca Anderson when this particular tool was still useful, when making sure to have his case files in Patrick's hands was still important – that he would have preferred to chase and be chased, still. The world of death suits him, threats and velvety promises alike slipping right off his tongue like they were meant to.

(And sweet little things, of course. "Do you want to grab dinner? Wanna go on a pancake date?"

Embellished with a thoughtful, playful smile of course. And who would say no to that?)

He sits on the bed of an expensive hotel room, his arms wrapped around gallant little Teresa, two blocks away from Patrick's pathetic (interesting) Airstream. Later he will deny even thinking it, but he likes that he introduced himself to Patrick's valiant lady as someone else, someone harmless and friendly and good; they could have been a beautiful imprint on a hot seaside plantation, floating through the grounds with genuine smiles on their faces.

Because even though she does not love him like she does her precious golden Patrick, she still feels things for him; because oh, he's kind and he's thoughtful and he's not a manipulative conman and she does need a break from all that stuff, doesn't she?

She says the words, though – she tries to convince herself that she means them; "I love you, Marcus."

His smile is a cut of teeth across his face, but there are no lights on in their little hotel room and in the blue dark of dusk, it might look like a gentle, pretty thing to her. "I love you too, Teresa."

No one will believe him later, when he says that he loves them both.

And perhaps it's better that way, because he won't have to persuade them, in a moment of regret, that he was lying.

* * *

There are pages missing in their novel, Jane realizes before it all begins, before they get entangled with each other, before he and his always-smirking nemesis even meet in person, before the madness begins, before, _before_.

There are pages missing, pages that ought to be stained with crimson but are now empty and white. Red John has been gone for two years now, he left the man an ashen corpse in the middle of a park, and though it's a relief (no more shadows, no more red), it's odd. It's unsettling. It's _wrong_.

There should be blood in this story. There always has been, and its absence is something twisted, something strange and unwelcome.

* * *

This is the truth of it;

the prodigal son always returns. In the stories, in the myths, in the songs once sung by courtiers in the golden halls of the mighty, the hero always slays the beast, the son always returns, the unwanted child drifts down the river in a basket, and comes back with an army.

Sometimes, Patrick Jane has learned, the stories can be manipulated. Sometimes the prodigal son and the creature in the dark are one and the same.

And books do that to you, some times; book writers like twists and turns and sickening things that you can't stop reading no matter how much you want to avert your gaze from the page.

"So how did you do it?" he asks now, his voice even. It's a little odd, if he wants to be honest with himself, he would have thought the question would leave his mouth a hushed whisper. "Did you pay the sheriff to act the part? Threatened him? Did you give him acting lessons, he was quite convincing at some point."

Marcus laughs, and it's a fetching thing, even now. He can't quite blame Teresa for falling for this quick curve of the lips, this happy sound coming from the man's throat. He takes a step forward, and Patrick, from his seat on the couch, body taut and fingers shaking, wonders – is the other man the writer, or just another character? Is he the plot twist, or just the clue that was always there, and the protagonist was too blind to see?

"Does it matter?" Marcus murmurs, rests his hand lightly on Jane's shoulder, and the latter almost expects to feel nails digging through the cloth and into his flesh. He doesn't. "Does it matter now, my dear Patrick?"

Patrick blinks, stares, and then smiles. Ah, he thinks.

Not the writer, not the plot twist – the clue. Revealed in the very first chapter of their book.

* * *

"He is Mar," Lisbon had muttered, in what feels like a thousand lifetimes ago. "What the hell does it mean?"

* * *

He understands it all later, of course. He understands it when he feels Marcus' lips on the side of his neck, when he feels bile rising in his throat at the contact but can't stop his body from responding, when the whispered words against his skin become sentences-

Sentences that weave the story of a doughty lady who is no damsel in distress but rather the knight in shining armor, a valiant woman in love who managed to make the big red dragon finally cease his killings not with a sword, but with a few perfectly chosen words, with a few beautiful caresses. Because it doesn't matter that she doesn't _love_ Marcus, no - she likes him, and that's more than enough.

It doesn't take long for him to understand what Marcus Pike means when he says, "But _I_ love her, almost as much as I love you". He just doesn't believe it.

"You were a fool, my Patrick, to pretend not to return her love for so long," Marcus Pike says to him one summer afternoon, and this is it; the moment you reach the end of the page and you turn the page and wait with bated breath, wait to read on, to find out – has the villain really died? Did the hero really win? Is this the end? (But I wanted to read more.)

It takes Lisbon's mouth against his to believe the other man's words, to admit to himself that this is something inescapable, wrong, disgusting, awful, (_brilliant?_).

This is a book, he thinks, that should win several awards. This is a book, he knows, that should be banned, burned, have its pages torn and trampled on until there's nothing but ashes and tiny pieces of amorphous paper where the lines, written in blood, used to be.

* * *

He doesn't tell Teresa. No, Marcus keeps his and Patrick's little truth a secret, because he doesn't want to ruin their happy triangle now that it has just formed.

"We wouldn't to hurt her feelings all over again, would we Patrick?" he asks, voice a sibilant whisper next to the other man's ear, and he can almost feel the hate radiating off Patrick's body. "She wants us both, after all. She wants you more than she wants her life at this point, and she likes me more than she likes herself. Why deny her? Why deny _us_?"

Oh, I should become a writer, he thinks later. How many copies I would sell.

* * *

"Do you ever think about Red John anymore?" Lisbon asks one dusky evening -they're out late, at an Italian restaurant, the last there, apart from a bustling family who are enjoying several bottles of the local red, little children chatting excitedly, jabbering away to their parents.

(Jane had a family once. A CBI team that learned to love him despite his faults. Before that, another family. A real one – a wife. A daughter.

Jane has a bad track record with families.)

Jane considers his words very carefully, watches her green eyes glinting in the candlelight. "He slips into my thoughts," is the answer he settles with and it feels very apt, because it is true.

Unbidden, unannounced, he has crawled into their consciousness again.

They eat in silence - they do much in silence; admire paintings, wander the streets, hands brushing against each other, but lately they fuck noisily, harshly; the slap of skin on skin, mouth on mouth, teeth in flesh, and it feels like they're praying - but it's a comfortable silence, a familiarity now that doesn't need words.

Suddenly, and without warning, Jane starts to laugh.

His entire body quakes with some hilarity that sounds so pained that some of the children on the other table stop and stare, tugging on their mother's skirts with wide eyes.

Jane looks at Lisbon, and she starts to laugh too. They must look mad, but it does not worry them. Both know their own insanity.

A man who is not the waiter approaches, tall and dark-haired, hands quick and nimble, silently collecting the dishes. He smiles down at Lisbon, full of teeth.

She drops her wine glass on the floor with a smash, glass exploding across the cobblestone floor, a single tear of laughter dribbling down her cheek, laughter gone from her mouth as she stares and stares and stares. "Marcus? What – what are you doing here?"

"Folie à deux?" asks Marcus Pike, "Or, indeed, trois."

* * *

Outside, they are three different books, three separate novels; but inside they are a mass of tangled lines all wreathed together into a poem that doesn't make sense, red and gold and green all meshed together until there is only dark brown that looks like black left.

There's no meaning to our story, Lisbon thinks and sighs against conman lips. There are hands on her hips and shoulders and her own fingers are tracing patterns against a smooth ribcage, circles and hearts and triangles, until her hands are trembling and she has to grip the sheets beneath her, fist her fingers into hair (blond or dark brown – it doesn't matter), dig her nails into flesh.

_I _am _going to kill you_, she thinks she hears Jane murmur against the other man's shoulder, and it's a strained, breathless gasp muffled by skin, so low she is _sure _she only imagined it-

But then she hears the equally breathless response, laced with the tiniest of smiles, _You already have, Patrick. You both have_. At that she shuts her eyes, bites the inside of her cheek and surrenders herself to a whirlwind of sensations, abandons thought and logic because these things don't matter, not now.

Sex, it seems, stabilizes everything and just like that they've started to function, almost like normal lovers, almost like a family.

Lisbon thinks that when, a good two hours later, slips through the curtains out into the cramped balcony, and nearly laughs at the irony, the ridiculousness, the easiness of it all. Her two men remain asleep inside, tangled up in each other, the sheets lying carelessly on the floor – and for a moment she is tempted to go back inside and take a picture, because this will only last for so long before they remember to start competing with each other again.

She thinks she can still feel their lips on hers, like a ghost, their hands trailing along her arms. She thinks she can still hear the noises they made, she thinks she can still see them at her sides – she remembers teeth against her skin and she knows they _must_have been Marcus's, the man's hands stroking through Jane's hair, and how both men grin even during sex, how their winning smiles never disappear unless there are better uses to be found for their mouths.

Lisbon feels like she's nearing the end of the book, a few pages away from reaching the epilogue, but something happens and the volume gets twisted, turned until the end becomes the beginning, until the last page becomes the first and everything starts anew.

When Marcus wakes up, he comes out to the balcony with a cigarette, pushing the door open and leaving it like that, stretching out his arms before leaning forward and curving his hands around the rail. Taking in the sprawling city without a care for his nakedness, and Lisbon can't help but smile.

"Aren't you going to lecture me about the dangers of smoking?" he asks her, and winks, and her smile widens.

He blows smoke into the morning air and they both watch it disappear, wafting away over his shoulder until he turns with a grin, presses his lips to hers and tells her that Patrick snores, and quite loudly so, before going back inside.

She stays out on the balcony until the sun is high in the sky. When Patrick wakes up, Marcus has already left, and her golden-haired man acts like nothing ever happened.

* * *

How they got there went somehow like this;

Lisbon had ducked down to pick up the shattered glass, knocking Jane's knees with her shaking elbows before picking up every shard, clenching her fist (because Marcus wasn't supposed to be here tonight, she was supposed to be with Jane, she isn't supposed to be fine with wanting them both, she isn't supposed to be thinking _God, what am I doing_?) so they cut a dozen shallow slices into her flesh.

She had straightened up, swallowing, throwing the shards onto the table, two sets of eyes keenly watching the bloodied glass drop. Marcus had widened his eyes in a perfect immitation of genuine astonishment, and had subtly pocketed a particularly bloody piece when Lisbon wasn't watching. All the while, Jane had been silent.

He had been silent when Marcus had proposed they all go to his hotel room for a drink, he had been silent when Marcus had run the small piece of cut glass across his lips while Lisbon had excused herself in the bathroom, he had been silent when Marcus had replaced the bloodied glass with his own mouth. At some point, Lisbon had returned from the bathroom, and had found equilibrium before her;

Equilibrium, in its rawest form.

* * *

In the end, sex is what stabilizes everything, Marcus thinks. It causes the tension, the hatred, to dissipate in those moments between silken sheets.

But it just hides it all away, lets the loathing and strain boil undercover and unseen until it all erupts and burns everything in its wake.

He, however, chooses to ignore that part. After so many years playing cat and mouse with Patrick Jane, it's become easy to turn a blind eye to the things you don't want to see. It's become easy to see only what you want to see.

And Marcus Pike wants to see the perfect ending to his perfect story.

* * *

Let him read the book however he pleases, Patrick Jane thinks. Let the reader think he's weaving his own story. Then change the book; leave him weeping, cursing, wanting his money back. You can lead a man anywhere you want as long as he thinks he's driving.

Isn't this what best sellers are made of?

* * *

One morning at a hotel room outside Los Angeles, Marcus wakes up, Teresa is still sleeping beside him and Patrick is gone.

He notices it almost immediately, notices how his legs are sprawled across more room and he's no longer half-falling off the bed. He has to blink against head-rush when he carefully disentangles himself from Teresa's arm, and the floorboards are cold to the touch, and this is not like a novel because a few moments later she opens her eyes as well, rubs sleep away with the back of her hand and looks around with disappointment written clearly on her face.

He suggests they have breakfast together, and she simply shakes her head, slips into last night's clothes and leaves.

He is certain Patrick will be waiting for a dead body under a grinning bloody face, anxiety and fear coiling and clenching in his golden opponent's stomach, but he won't give him one, just to spite him.

"Angry sex only works when we're angry, Patrick", he tells the other man a fortnight later, fisting his hands into golden hair and pulling his mouth against his. Teresa is sitting on the bed, watching with mild curiosity and some trepidation, until they collapse on the mattress next to her. "If we have it when we're not angry, then we might end up lovers, and Teresa will be left all on her own."

Somewhere beside them, Teresa laughs. Patrick looks up at him and there is something in his eyes, shimmering in the dim lamplight, dancing side by side with every last ounce of the man's explosive hatred.

And this – _this_, is a pair of parentheses, encompassing a long sentence made from letters written not in blood, but deep black ink, curving and twisting, sinuous, against stark white paper.

We're reaching the end, we're reaching the end of the book; this is what shimmers in Patrick Jane's eyes - this is what Marcus Pike chooses to ignore.

* * *

Sometimes Lisbon wonders if people will tell tales of them, if their deeds will be written on paper and sold out and become best-sellers. Probably not, because she highly doubts anyone will ever know.

And it's certainly better that way.

On a warm summer night they have decided to stay outside, on a sprawling cement rooftop of an abandoned house they have started to call their own, lying beneath a most picturesque starry sky. One of them – she isn't quite sure which one, if it's Jane or Marcus, the cadence of their voices has become the same to her ears and it's almost frightening – asks the other, _what would you do without me_?

She's lying in the middle, the fingers of her left hand entwined with Jane's, the fingers of her right hand entwined with Marcus's, and they've consumed so much alcohol the stars above have become a distant humming, golden blur.

A sigh, a shrug, and answering the question with a question – _why, what would _you _do without me_?

It's Lisbon who answers, in the end, voice barely above a whisper, like a half-finished line that you have to turn the page to read it whole; she says, _nothing_, and she's not sure they heard her. And she isn't sure why they're asking each other those questions, either. (Isn't this all happening because of her, after all? Huh.)

But Jane's words ring in her own ears, and it's a voice filled with hatred and it's breathless and cut by shameful moans, and it's not directed at her – _I _am _going to kill you, one day._

It's the alcohol, she tells herself come morning, it's the alcohol and the sex and all those emotions coiling and clenching in her stomach that make her hear things. She has imagined those hateful exchanges, surely, nothing's real.

_God_, she thinks, and closes her eyes. _What am I doing_?

* * *

(Maybe I'll write us a story.)

It will be the one in which Jane loves Lisbon the right way and he loves her enough. His love will never overlap and his love will never stretch too thin, will not become ragged and bruised, will not consume him and eat his heart until it's running out of borrowed time.

It'll be the perfect story with the perfect amount of loving Lisbon so much that there's no room left for him to love himself, not even a little. Because he will not love a monster.

(Red John – Marcus, _Marcus _now – thinks he is the exception, _always _the exception, to that, and to everything. Perhaps he is.)

* * *

Lisbon loses herself somewhere between JaneMarcusHerself and can't get back out, even when she crawls and digs and covers herself in yellowing diary pages and blood and false hope.

She can't get out. Smothers herself so thoroughly in Jane and Marcus that she can't find herself anymore between the lines.

But maybe, that's okay. Maybe this wasn't the right story. Maybe she's just messed up again.

So Lisbon scratches the words out, crumples the paper in her hands, throws it in the dustbin and starts the story all over again.

It will be the one in which-

* * *

All books end, some day, even when you don't want them to, even when you want them to last forever.

(Sometimes they end much too late, especially when you can't bear to read them whole, when you dread the ending, when you want to put them down but you can't help yourself and you keep reading and reading until you wish you hadn't.)

Patrick Jane thinks, as he drops the gun and tears his gaze from the man's bloody corpse at his feet, that this is a book that should win several awards.

("What did you _do_?" Lisbon's cry is shattering, and he wants to scream as well. He doesn't; he lowers his gaze, to the gun on the wooden floorboards, and tells her everything.

Once they're away from the crime scene, in what will feel like a lifetime later, Lisbon will mutter, "He is Mar. _He is Mar_.")

Patrick Jane thinks, as he walks out of the room and wraps his arms around Lisbon's petite frame, as they both leave the abandoned house with shaky steps, clinging to each other like they're drowning, that this is a book that should be banned.


End file.
